TellMe Launches a Killer Mobile Product — If you have a cell phone that supports the new TellMe mobile application, you will never use 411 again to find a business. It launches today at 5 AM PST. — TellMe mobile is a free Java application that you install on your phone.

BBC plans online children's world — A virtual world which children can inhabit and interact with is being planned by the BBC. — CBBC, the channel for 7-12 year olds, said it would allow digitally literate children the access to characters and resources they had come to expect.

In The Time Of "Me First": IBM Slowr? — Social applications are likely to be the major theme in software this year. IBM has been pushing hard in recent years, building on the huge installed base and share-of-mind in the enterprise software world, and now has launched a new product family …

Second Life: It's not a game — Fortune's David Kirkpatrick reports on why IBM's Sam Palmisano and other tech leaders think Second Life could be a gold mine. — NEW YORK (Fortune) — Last November in Beijing, IBM gathered 2,000 employees, with 5,000 more watching on the web …

It's not a game (cont.) — In this realm any resident can become an entrepreneur. There are nightclub owners, jewelry makers, landscapers and even pet manufacturers. In December, Linden Lab estimated that 17,000 residents had positive cash flow in Linden dollars, with about 450 generating monthly income …

Google to Fund Indian Startups — Early-stage fund, Seedfund, will help Google sow the seeds of a future buyout. — Google's style is usually to pay huge dollops for the startups it finds interesting. In India, though, it has chosen to take an indirect route.

Record Labels Contemplate Unrestricted Digital Music — As even digital music revenue growth falters because of rampant file-sharing by consumers, the major record labels are moving closer to releasing music on the Internet with no copying restrictions — a step they once vowed never to take.

Report: Google Doesn't Renew Google.de, Site Goes Down — Reports are coming in from Germany that Google.de was down "for many hours" yesterday, and has now gone live again. We're trying to confirm the reason, but it appears to be because Google forgot to renew the Google.de domain name.

Vista Service Pack 1 is coming — Reckon you won't upgrade to Vista until the first service pack is released? That's looking likely to be the second half of this year, according to Microsoft's latest email blast. — The company has put out a call for "customers and partners (to) …

Throwaway Identities — Written by Jitendra Gupta of KarmaWeb and edited by Richard MacManus — Social Media researcher danah boyd recently recently wrote in her blog about throwaway identities in MySpace: … danah notes that teens often start new accounts on a whim - in IM, email, website logins.

Forget ABCs - The Social Media Alphabet Is DNRS — Many search marketers know their search engine alphabet, A for Ask.com; G for Google; M for Microsoft Live.com and Y for Yahoo. But how many know the important letters of the social media alphabet, D for Digg; N for Netscape; R for Reddit and S for StumbleUpon?

Best Practices for Title Tags — It's been a while since I provided some straightforward, back to basics style advice and there can be little doubt that the title tag is worthy of attention for beginners and experts alike. And so I present... How to Make the Best Title Tag Possible:

The Connection Between Short, Modular and Open — How did we get from the two-hour film to the 24-minute TV sitcom? Why is it that the Academy award-winning short film of yesteryear was watched by a few thousand, while a YouTube clip shot on a camera phone might be watched by hundreds of thousands or even millions of viewers?